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6 injured in knife attack at China rail station

Six people were injured by knife-wielding assailants at South China's Guangzhou Railway Station, local police reported Tuesday, in the country's third violent attack at a train station in just over nine weeks.

BEIJING — Six people were injured by knife-wielding assailants at South China's Guangzhou Railway Station, local police reported Tuesday, in the country's third violent attack at a train station in just over nine weeks.

Despite a recent increase in armed patrols, the latest incident confirms the challenge of securing China's public places against attacks authorities have blamed on separatists from the northwest.

The assailants used knives to hack passengers around 11:30 a.m. Tuesday local time in the Guangzhou Railway Station square, city police in the Guangdong provincial capital wrote on Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like microblog.

Officers on patrol issued a verbal warning, without effect, then shot and caught one male suspect, the statement said. The six people injured were taken to a hospital, police said.

No official information on the attackers, including their number or ethnic group, was immediately released. Witnesses quoted by state media, including the People's Daily, said there were two to four attackers, two of whom may have escaped.

One man, with the last name Yang, sat in shock for two hours after he fled an attacker who chased him as he exited the station, The Southern Metropolitan Daily reported. Yang had just arrived from Kunming, in southwest China, where he had witnessed and survived a similar attack in March.

The incident Tuesday forms the latest and apparently least deadly of a series of attacks against railway users in China. On March 1, a group armed with knives and short swords killed 29 people and injured 143 at Kunming Railway Station. Last week, 79 people were injured and three died at a railway station in Urumqi, capital of the northwest Xinjiang region, after a knife and bomb attack.

Authorities said those incidents were undertaken by religious extremists from Xinjiang, also the alleged home of the suspects in the Kunming terror attack, who sought independence for the desert-bound, resource-rich region, home to the mostly Muslim Uighur people. Uighur activists abroad say some Uighurs are driven to violence by repressive state policies that restrict their religion, language and culture.

After Kunming, China's Ministry of Public Security stepped up armed patrols of public places including railway stations, and increased gun training for police, most of whom do not regularly carry firearms. Tuesday's attack shows that assailants still consider stations worthwhile targets, while the continuing use of knives highlights the relative difficulty in accessing guns or other more deadly weapons.

After the attack in Urumqi, China's Communist Party leader Xi Jinping vowed a long-term fight against terror. Some Chinese demand quicker results. "I don't want to hear the words 'verbal warning' again," Fan Xin, a military commentator based in Beijing, wrote on Sina Weibo Tuesday. "Stabbing people in public places, does that need a verbal warning? You can't kill people, if they continue, then the police must open fire!"

Witnesses of the Kunming massacre told USA TODAY they were frustrated that some police officers who arrived at the scene appeared to await orders to fire, even as the attackers continued to spill blood.

Medical personnel help people who were injured during a knife attack at a railway station on May 6 in Guangzhou, China. Six people were wounded in the attack. AFP/Getty Images